Rain Fade v Cable outages

[Geronimo]

Does anyone know of any real research on the incidence of weather created problems on cable vs. Satellite?

[waydwolf]

    I'm pretty sure there is none. Cable, when fittings are done correctly and cabling is unmolested, has no weather related problems except when temperature extremes damage nodes or amplifiers or a hurricane damages the head end reception station, or violent weather or ice take out a drop or hardline.

    DBS on the other hand has a chance of disruption every time there is any precipitation and winds will damage dishes more easily than a cable drop given the relative size for the wind to grab.

    Not to mention many installers are idiots and mount dishes at the opposite end of a roof from the Line of Sight and place boresight parallel and conformal to the roof. Water spraying up on impact from the roof surface during the rain can as much as double the water per unit volume in front of the boresight and when you get a foot and a half of snow thirty feet long in front of it, oops.

    Cabling for satellite should be much more quality driven given the higher frequency range(5Mhz-2050Mhz) yet satellite installers almost exclusively use simple hex crimps while compression fittings in cable which are higher quality are fairly common in cable as are grease and grommets. Not to mention cable companies at least have a Quality Control check system whereas very few satellite installation companies ever bother unless a customer complains. I've cleaned up way more weather related damage to external cabling and associated items in satellite than cable.

    Cable wins for weather in my experience in installations.

 

[Geronimo]

Maybe I did not make myself clear. There may not be cable rain fade but there most certainly are cable outages due to weather. Cable frequerntly goes out ---sometimes over wide areas and for prolonged periods of time because of atmospheric conditions.


I was not referring to problems associated with an individual use or installation. That would be hard to track. And again ther may be no good stats for any of this.

[JayeDVXIII]

Last nite I experienced my first rain fade, but I hesitate to call it "fade" and more or less "rain failure"

Normally, I have a 125 and 112 readings on both 110 and 119 but for whatever reason, last nite's Atlanta thunderstorm seemed to really concentrate over my neighborhood and badda-boom...that really cool "ice machines" show I watched on the Science Channel last nite sputtered, tiled, pixelated and then went to "acquiring sat signal..please wait"

This stayed that way for almost 15 minutes while my neighborhood was pummelled with hard rain. I wonder if the cloud cover caused it, or, if the roof job was just done poorly?

[JayeDVXIII]

what' even more interesting is that I'm from oregon and it rains there constantly...yet I never ONCE had rain fade while I lived there.

[Tomsoundman]

I was visiting family in Greensboro, NC and saw a local cable commercial that was putting down dishes because of rain fade. (I think that particular commercial was discussed here before, but it ticked me off. )

Three guys there watching, 2 satellite users, one cable (his house) so we got to argue a little about it.

[Mike500]

[i]Originally posted by waydwolf

Not to mention many installers are idiots and mount dishes at the opposite end of a roof from the Line of Sight and place boresight parallel and conformal to the roof. Water spraying up on impact from the roof surface during the rain can as much as double the water per unit volume in front of the boresight and when you get a foot and a half of snow thirty feet long in front of it, oops.

[/B]

Contrary to what you have heard, water spraying on the dish has very little to do with rain fade. Rain fade occurs from water droplets high up in the clouds which block the signal between the dish and the satellite. Asthetically, placing the dish on the opposite side of the roof has it's advantages for customer satisfaction. Here, in the South, where we get little snow, it is a preferred option. In the North, the preferred option would be on a pole on the roof to reach above the snow pack or close to the ground to make the dish reachable.

Not all of us satellite installers use hex crimp connectors. Cox cable still uses hex crimp connectors, as do many cable companies, because of cost. There is a great variation in hex crimp connectors. When matched to the correct sized crimper and a high quality connector like T&B or PPC, hex crimps will have a long life. Like hex crimps, the market will begin to be flooded with cheap low quality imported compression connectors in the future. This too, will compromise quality.:D

[JayeDVXIII]

my recent dish installation included really fat connectors with strange rubber type gaskets...are these hot the "hex" connections you guys dis so much? Also, is the tool I would need a very expensive tool?

[Mike500]

Yes, sounds like your're talking about Snap=N-Seal connectors and the IT1000 tool. Here's a link to one on sale at Ebay:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&category=32848&item=3010834274&rd=1

[JayeDVXIII]

79.99????????????????? um ..no!

[raj2001]

Cable TV reliability varies according to the area in which you live. Here in New York, you will find that cable outages occur more in Queens, Brooklyn, Bronx and SI because most of their cable is above ground. In Manhattan, alot of the cable is below ground, and not subject to harsh weather, vandals, and drunk drivers.

I've had digital cable from Time Warner for approximately a year and have seen approximately two to three outages, which were planned outages related to software upgrades. These outages were at 2AM or thereabouts. Most times I could simply continue watching the analog channels (locals) but I would lose the digital channels and EPG.

With D*, I have seen 3 outages due to rain fade, lasting approximately 15 minutes each. On Christmas night, I lost my signal for over 3 hours due to snow collecting on the dish. So for me both are about even.

By the way, the installer who installed my system used compression connectors.

[Richard King]

last nite's Atlanta thunderstorm seemed to really concentrate over my neighborhood Atlanta must have really gotten hit last night. I lost my Starband feed for a short time because of weather at the uplink site, just outside of Atlanta.

[dtcarson]

I have no idea what they used when installing ours, but since we got it a month and a half ago, we've had one instance of rain outage with Dish in Raleigh NC--it was off and on for about an hour, and when it was on, it kept having to refocus on the signal, and it didn't get a good signal, or keep it for long, whereas we got 125 when installed. But it was the kind of storm where the power went out repeatedly, sometimes for seconds, sometimes for half hour, so even if satellite worked, the tv didn't have any power. Other than that, we haven't run into anything, even with the recent snow/ice storm we had [I know, nothing compared to what NY and NJ got, but still.]

I can see cable being more stable than dish in most weather conditions, simply because of how it gets there--an 18" dish on the roof is certainly going to be more affected by wind, etc than a cable in the ground. I guess weather related problems with a dish, would *normally* be localized [my dish is snowy, the wind blew it off angle, etc] with the exception of heavy cloud/rain/electrical storm blocking the satellite signal; whereas cable would be more centralized, affecting more people at once.

[Mike123abc]

Of course you can drop the amount of rain fade dramatically by increasing the size of the dish. I use 24" and 35" dishes and have not had rain fade since they were installed. I am in an area of the country that has many thunderstorms.

[scooper]

I loose my dish signal - when you should be looking for shelter ! But that's why I have an OTA antenna up as well. And I can honestly say that I've never lost satellite TV from a car hitting an utility pole and knocking it down.

Over all - a properly installed dbs system goes out no more or less often than cable.

[Geronimo]

Thanks for all of your thoughts on this. I guess there is no hard data. To be truthful it would probably be pretty hard to put together such a trest and well who would fund it? If either the DBS or cable industries provided the dollars I would be suspect. And who else would care enough to do it?

[Richard King]

Being in the middle of the lightning capitol of the world, I must admit that I do get an occasional outage, but it has to be a real gully washer to do the job. Normally the outage occurs just before the storm gets here, when the dish is looking through a tall stack of thunderclouds. There are some advantages to living in the thunderstorm capitol of the world though: http://www.pbase.com/image/7758915/large

[Keith4USC]

I had digital cable here in Columbia, SC til a few months back..... The digital cable went off several times and once for 2 days.... The reg cable worked but the digital signal was out..... But the biggest problem I had with the digital cable was a weak signal..... It kept breaking up or freezing up...... They finally fixed it after I complained for months (they thought I was just complaining)..... Soon after, I turned the cable off and went back to Dish and then in late November I switched to directv..... I have experienced one rain outage since I had the service.... It was only off for 10 minutes....... That was when we had a 3 inch snowstorm......

The only regret I have is not having Directv from the get go.....

[waydwolf]

Originally posted by Geronimo
Maybe I did not amke myself clear. There may not be cable rain fade but there most certainly are cable outages due to weather. Cable frequerntly goes out ---sometimes over wide areas and for prolonged periods of time because of atmospheric conditions.


I was not referring to problems associated with an individual use or installation. That would be hard to track. And again ther may be no good stats for any of this.

    Where are you that cable is going out like that? We got whalloped in CT with two feet of snow recently and the cable never went out in any system I'm aware of short of a main line going down due to snow and ice or individual drops. My modem was fine, and my digital boxes showed no increase in error rates.

    In the time I've worked in cable, cable does NOT frequently go out. Not anywhere in CT. My family has had Cox Cable for a very very long time, some have had TCI/AT&T/Comcast. I've worked with Charter and Cablevision as well. The VAST majority of weather-related problems fall either into wind/ice/snow damage to lines or slow-mo water/ice damage to drops and fittings. Some smaller number result from temperature damage to actives such as diplexers, but the newer models are ever more resistant. I've seen NO such evolution in LNB assemblies and heated dishes and LNBs are far from standard in DBS.

    Again, cable does NOT frequently go out because of atmospheric conditions, much less frequently and for extended periods. Not unless it is a very old system, has been hit with major violent weather, and they've got a badly under power staff with few resources. But then you're probably talking an old 36 channel style analog system strung across a huge rural area and not a modern HFC plant where ice storms can result in 96 hours of techs rotating through eight to ten hours shifts and four hours off and then back on again. I've see such sieges.

    Now satellite on the other hand is subject to weather outages whenever enough precipitation clouds the Line of Sight, or wind physically damages the dish. And individual installations are an important factor because improper mounting will certainly lead to very easy wind damage, long before you're concerned about rain fade statistics over the long haul.

    I wish I could point you to statistics online, but all I have is personal experience from installations and trouble calls in both mediums. Cable in my experience is rarely disrupted by weather in any system I've worked while satellite is disrupted fairly constantly.

 

[Geronimo]

I live in Fairfax County VA. The cable often goes out. It is hardly a remote outpost. It is one of the more affluent counties in the US and is located (partly) inside the Washington Beltway. A fairly high density suburb.

I hear others report the same thing. The reason for the thread was to try to determine whether this is purely anecdotal or what?

I don't think that cable goes out constantly. I also don't think that satellite rain fade is as severe a problem as the cable industry might claim.

I started with no preconceived notions of which was superior or more relaible. I merely asked if anyone knew of any research. It seems to be one of those topics where everyone has an opinion.

Frankly I think the claim that weather NEVER disrupts cable is ridiculous. Heck electricity goes out too. So does phone service. Clearly there are weather related outages. However it is just as clear that DBS goes out too. But again I don't think there is any solid research on the subject. I just wondered whether there was.





:hi:

[Mike500]

A number of local cable companies in small towns use Dish Network for their feeds. I've seen the signal go out on account of rain fade and the "Acquiring satellite signal" screen on a tv connected to a local cable tv system.

On the other side, any atmospheric or water intrusion into miles and mile of cable and hundreds of connectors will degrade any cable TV signal.

On satellite, low quality connections from water intrusion may be diagnosed as rain fade.

[jlabsher]

I live in St Mary's county MD about 60 miles south of DC. We have a mom & pop cable company that often goes out. When I first got dish installed I got some rain fade last summer. Got up on the roof and adjusted the dish slightly. Have never had a rain fade since or a snow fade since. With a properly aimed Dish in Fairfax you should never have rain fade. If you lived in monsoon areas you might get some.

[Bob Haller]

Well even cable can get rainfade. Their BUDS at the headend can be affected, just as dBS BUDS can be at the uplink center.

Comcast the latest incarnation of TCI, AT&T is using rainfade in their advertising.

First put you dish down low for easy access for sevice or snow clearance. Avoid it looking across a roof so the water doesnt hit and splash increasing the possiblity of rainfade. Tweak your dish for top signal strength, to minimize its chance. I spent hours getting mine just right. Signal strength over 100 and most transponders maxed out at 125. E should really offer a oversized 500 for folks who want one. I was planning on going to 24 inch or larger dishes but the tweaking did the job.

We only get rainfade in storms that if you were driving your would pull over. At most its a few minutes a few times a year. Back when I had cable poles getting knocked down were a big problem, along with noisy amps and power failures taking out those amps blackemning the entire system.

[Nick]

I remember the uglee green and yellow scrambled egg hovering over the Cheyenne uplink that had all E* customers out at the same time. Talk about rain fade! One time in almost three years -- not bad, Kimosabe.